That’s definitely not true. Just yesterday I was eating a salad (with chicken and bacon and cheese even) and I had an older coworker pass by and grumpily tell me he didn’t eat rabbit food.

Is this the first time you’ve ever been exposed to humor?

Impressive, I guess, but how many of those 2 million posts have a single comment? If 90% of these are just bots reposting things from Reddit with no further engagement…

So this is the 2nd time you’ve mentioned subscribing to communities and asked me what the point of subscribing to multiple ones are. You are proving my point just by asking this question. If you subscribe to one community per interest then this is literally not an issue that you will encounter. This only happens to people who browse /all or search by new or generally try to see everything that the fediverse has to offer. So I’m really not sure why you keep asking me about why someone would subscribe to multiple communities because that’s not something I have suggested that anyone should do. In fact, I don’t really see much of a point in subscribing to ANY communities, but that’s beside the scope of what we’re discussing here.

Also, I wouldn’t call what we’re discussing “reposting”. Reposting generally means that you’re taking older content and posting it again in the efforts of bringing new attention to it, either from people who are new to the community, or by people who never saw it the first time it was posted. Again, it’s semantics, but the fact that you’re calling these types of posts “reposts” really shows your lack of understanding of the larger problem here. It’s also why your definition of spam absolutely doesn’t apply here, as none of the content we’re discussing is commercial or unsolicited.

YOU’RE the one that’s not addressing the issue here that I’ve brought up. I’ve never said that what’s going on isn’t annoying or a problem. I’m just saying (for like, the third time now, but who’s counting) that it’s an issue of blame. By continuing to mis-label it as spam, you’re placing the blame on the people who are contributing to the community as a whole. The people who are bringing content to this platform. The people who make it worth this place even existing. And by suggesting that the solution is to block those people, you’re literally suggesting to people that they remove quality content being posted to the correct places. This is insane to me that you think this is a solution.

Look, there is a problem with the way the fediverse is set up. And it needs addressing. I’ve already suggested a couple of different ways to fix it, both in the short term, and in the long term. Your “solution” is to block anyone who is participates in more than one community just because they are trying to spark a discussion in the most places possible. I’m not saying what they’re doing is working out, but to place the blame on the people who are actually trying to make it better is just…I don’t have words for how ridiculous that is. People are using this platform as it is set up in the way that it is intended. That’s not spam, no matter how many times you incorrectly proclaim it is.

it doesn’t work or help Lemmy to do what you’re suggesting

Just curious, but what do you mean with what I’m suggesting? I’m not saying I like, or even agree with multiple posts in multiple likeminded communities. Hell, I actively dislike the fact that there ARE so many communities that are basically clones of each other. It’s a problem that needs to be addressed. I just said that doing it wasn’t spam. What other suggestions of mine do you think is harmful to Lemmy?

I think the biggest issue here is just your way of thinking. You referred to Lemmy multiple times as “this website” or “this site” and that way of thinking is at the heart of the issue”. It’s not just a clone of Reddit, where everyone was on one site and everyone all has a chance to see all the same things. Every instance is different, shows you different content, and federates with other instances in different ways. It is set up to be different for a reason. There is no single thing that is good or bad for Lemmy as a whole, because Lemmy as a whole is not one single entity. Your “spam” problem is only a problem if you choose to look at as many instances of Lemmy as you can, which unfortunately is the best way to get new content for now. The solution moving forward is to curate the specific communities that you end up looking at by blocking instances that duplicate content, or hopefully Lemmy as a whole will allow for a better way to cut down on viewing repeated content across multiple instances. The solution is not to blame the people sharing content and block them from ever being able to share content to you again. Unless you’re just not interested in the content to begin with, but even then I would suggest it’s better to block communities rather than the people putting content in them.

I don’t disagree with much of anything you said (and it doesn’t sound like you disagree with anything I said either) aside from the classification that it’s all spam. If I make one on-topic post to a community and you don’t like it, that doesn’t mean it’s spam. If I made 2 posts to to different communities, you admit it’s not spam. The problem isn’t the users who are posting, and blocking them isn’t a solution, at least certainly not a long term one. The problem needs to be addressed at a fediverse level, and not at a content creator level.

If I send out an email to 100 of my friends inviting them to a party and they all wanted to get that email, that’s not spam. If I send out 100 emails to the same people asking them to buy essential oils, that’s spam. It’s not the amount of content that I send, it’s if the content is relevant and appropriate for the audience that defines if something is spam or not. I agree that it’s very annoying to see the same content in dozens of different places here, but to call it spam is to place the blame on the poster, and that’s not where we should be focusing the blame. Dance around it all you want, but posting on-topic content to the correct places isn’t the definition of spam. Period. The only people calling it spam are people, like yourself, who don’t know what spam actually is.

It would only be spam if it was posted to communities that aren’t on topic or if the individual communities were not interested in the content posted. The way the fediverse is set up, there are going to be tons of communities that all offer similar content. If I find an article that is on topic of several communities, why should I have to pick which one I post it to? How would I choose? Why can’t I post to multiple if I’m trying to get people in all communities to see it?

Spam is typically thought of as unwanted material. As long as the things that are being posted are legit, this isn’t a spam problem, it’s really a fediverse problem that someone is going to have to find a solution to like only displaying links one time if multiple posts are made to similar communities or better yet figuring out a way to federate multiple communities into one big community where everything posted to one automatically gets posted to all of them. But that’s still not spam, that’s just redundant on-topic posts being made to proper places.

It may be semantics, but word choice matters. Especially when your suggested “solution” involves blocking people who are posting legitimate content to places. If everyone goes around blocking all the people posting content, pretty soon there won’t be any content or any people to see it and that’s harmful to the fediverse as a whole. Let’s use the correct terminology and come up with good solutions to the actual issue at hand instead of thinking of it as just needing to block a few spammers like these people are sending out dick pill emails to thousands of people at once.

That’s not what spam is.